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And so, a year after Tom Renney got the heave-ho from behind the Edmonton Oilers bench in favour of a replacement with no NHL head coaching experience, it was Steve Tambellini’s turn to be identified as the reason why awful seasons and high draft picks haven’t yet translated into a winning hockey team in the Alberta capital.

Like Renney, Tambellini was dumped as general manager in favour of an individual with no previous experience in that role with an NHL team, Craig MacTavish.

Call it the Marc Bergevin Effect. If Bergevin could do what he has done in Montreal with zero experience, clearly experience doesn’t matter, right?

Well, we’ll see.

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While Oilers president Kevin Lowe was guilty of both some pointless boasting and wicked hyperbole on Monday, the latter by suggesting half the teams in the NHL would love to have his roster, there are clearly viable pieces in the Edmonton organization.

Let’s not dicker whether you’d rather have Erik Karlsson, Mika Zibanejad, Jakob Silfverberg and Robin Lehner over Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Jordan Schultz. Or whether the youth assembled on Long Island might be better than what has been accumulated in Edmonton.

The point is, the Oilers have made all the first overall picks and held on to all their kids, and now comes the tricky part of figuring ways to complement that group with capable veterans and role players to produce a more successful team.

MacTavish, with former Columbus GM Scott Howson as his right-hand man, now gets that task, made somewhat more difficult as Edmonton doesn’t have a history of being a destination of choice for established NHL free agents.

Still, clearly it’s time for some impatience in Edmonton.

That’s what MacTavish was saying Monday while Lowe was beating his chest, and with the Oilers about to become the NHL leader in being out of the playoffs the longest (seven years), MacTavish sure seems to be on to something.

You could argue, even, that a little impatience on NHL trade deadline day when the Oilers were sitting in the eighth and final Western Conference playoff spot might have kept the team in the race, as opposed to a minor move to bring in centre Jerrod Smithson.

A fair number of noteworthy veterans moved around the time of the trade deadline, including Jason Pominville, Marian Gaborik, Douglas Murray, Brenden Morrow, Jarome Iginla and Martin Erat, and if the Oilers had been willing to do something bold like trade their 2013 first-round pick, perhaps they might have landed one of those players or otherwise enhanced their roster.

But they didn’t, and Tambellini certainly didn’t build a reputation as a riverboat gambler while running the Oilers. Instead of drafting three forwards with three first overall picks, he might have tried to move on the draft floor in those years to acquire other assets, but instead chose to stick to the script that, presumably, Lowe and owner Daryl Katz had approved.

Now he’s lost his job, with the final nail in the coffin undoubtedly an ugly and embarrassing home-ice loss to Calgary on Saturday night. He was a class act as GM who may not have been flamboyant enough for some in the media, but then again, in a year in which Katz has tried a ham-handed blackmail attempt to get a new arena by threatening a move to Seattle, having someone in the organization without a penchant for making headlines wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

MacTavish will provide more sound bites, for sure. But he’ll need to build a support group around the kids, and will have to ask some tough questions.

Do the Oilers really need Hall, RNH, Eberle and Yakupov? Is Schultz really a top-end defenceman? Can Devan Dubnyk be a No. 1? Could Sam Gagner fetch some of what the Oilers need?

To do what the Oilers need to do, they’ll need a sharp pro scouting team. Doing things like trading Andrew Cogliano for a second-round pick won’t provide immediate help. The pro staff will have to come up with something better than the regrettable series of moves that sent Matt Greene and Jarret Stoll to L.A. for Lubomir Visnovsky, then saw Visnovsky exchanged for the now-untradeable Ryan Whitney.

MacTavish, a pretty smart fellow, will get lots of offers of “help” from his new GM colleagues around the league. The tough part will be picking out the anchors from the life jackets.

The belief in Edmonton that being really terrible will eventually produce a really good team is still being embraced, and there’s no point in changing the primary plan now.

But it’s going to take more than just drafting. It’s going to involve risk, something this organization has avoided for years.

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